Book and archival heritage

The significance of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana’s book and archival heritage lies in the remarkable richness and value of its manuscript and printed collections. The manuscript holdings are distinguished by their literary, philosophical, and patristic content, and constitute a fundamental testimony to ancient, medieval, and humanistic-Renaissance culture.

• The historical nucleus is Cardinal Bessarion’s collection, through which the two most celebrated manuscripts of the Iliad have been transmitted: the so-called Homerus Venetus A (10th cent.) and Homerus Venetus B (11th cent.), as well as the Anthologia Planudea (1299–1301), which, together with the Anthologia Palatina in Heidelberg, represents a precious witness to Greek epigrammatic poetry.
• Among the manuscripts preserved by the Library are numerous examples of the art of illumination, both from the Venice area and from other traditions.
  The thirteenth-century Psalterium with twenty-four full-page miniatures is of English origin; the fourteenth-century Officium of Queen Mary of Navarre is Iberian; the celebrated early sixteenth-century Breviarium, formerly owned by Cardinal Domenico Grimani, is Flemish, as is the Utrecht Book of Hours of the same period; the sixty-six miniatures accompanying the fifteenth-century Poem of Alexander by Ahmedi are of Ottoman
  The extensive decoration of the Missale Romanum, produced in the fourteenth century for use in St Mark’s Basilica, is Venetian in workmanship; the manuscript of Dante’s Commedia from San Giorgio Maggiore (14th or early 15th cent.) is from the Veneto-Emilia area.
  Of notable elegance and rich decoration are the manuscript of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, copied in 1481 for Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and the Evangelistarium Grimani (1528), with miniatures by Benedetto Bordon and Giulio Clovio.
• Among the manuscripts on scientific or naturalistic subjects are the Liber de simplicibus, formerly owned by Benedetto Rinio and produced by the physician Nicolò Roccabonella and the painter Andrea Amadio (15th cent.); the De architectura by Antonio Verulino, known as Filarete (15th cent.); and the remarkable corpus constituted by the Tabulae anatomicae of Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente (17th cent.).
• Particularly notable among the numerous manuscripts on Venetian and Veneto subjects are the Diarii of Marin Sanudo, in fifty-eight autograph volumes. Also preserved here are the wills of the Polo travellers: Marco the Elder (1280), Maffeo (1300), and the famous Marco Polo (1324), author of Il Milione.
• The map collection includes the remarkable World Map by Fra’ Mauro, the Atlas by Andrea Bianco (1436), and the wooden matrix of the Turkish-Venetian World Map (1559). Also notable is the edition of the Veduta di Venezia by Jacopo de’ Barbari.
• Among the printed works are the editions of Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz donated by Bessarion and bearing his coat of arms; the first book printed in Venice by Giovanni da Spira in 1469, Cicero’s Epistolae ad familiares; and the subsequent editions by Giovanni and Vindelino, including the editio princeps of Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Trionfi (1470), as well as many other fifteenth-century Venetian editions, the rich collection of Aldines, and the collection of eighteenth-century Venetian newspapers.
• The musical collections are also significant, including several autograph manuscripts by Benedetto Marcello and other Venetian composers, as well as an important collection of theatre librettos.
• Finally, mention should be made of the collection of the artist Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, consisting of graphic materials and a photographic archive.
• Among the numerous precious bindings, the Byzantine examples are inestimable: one dating from the late ninth to early tenth century, one from the tenth, and three from the fourteenth.

The Library’s current holdings consist of:

• approximately 1,000,000 volumes
• 13,117 bound manuscripts
• 4,639 unbound manuscripts
• 2,887 incunabula
• 24,060 sixteenth-century editions